Pickup trucks and small trailers have become common means of transporting relatively small recreational vehicles such as snowmobiles, motorcycles, dune buggies, garden tractors and the like. Even though such vehicles are relatively small, most are heavy and bulky rendering them difficult to manually lift into a pickup truck. Further, vehicles such as snowmobiles are too wide for two of them to fit side-by-side between the wheel wells boxed out of the beds of ordinary pickup boxes, although they will fit side-by-side within the width of the box itself above the wheel wells.
Various means have been devised to alleviate some of the problems with loading and transporting small vehicles; however, some of the simpler devices fall short of satisfactorily alleviating both the problems of manual lifting and providing sufficient surface area for transporting two snowmobiles side-by-side in the pickup box. Other devices have attempted to alleviate both of these problems, but they have become unduly complicated, burdensome and expensive to manufacture. Further, none of the means already devised have attempted to alleviate the additional problems of providing loading ramps suitable for accommodating snowmobile skis as well as nonskid traction surfaces for drive tracks of snowmobiles and drive wheels of other vehicles, especially under conditions in which the vehicles being loaded tend to carry snow, mud, and other foreign material onto the loading ramps.
Having taken the aforesaid problems into consideration, I have devised a more versatile, simple and easily manufactured transport platform and loading ramp structure which provides sufficient platform surface area to transport two snowmobiles side-by-side in a pickup truck including a novel and improved loading ramp assembly for accommodating various types of vehicles with interchangeable surfaces to facilitate loading and unloading vehicles of different types onto and from an elevated platform.